Chicken Manure

If Maryland moves forward with a chicken manure-burning electric power plant, a British company could revive its plans to build the facility on the Eastern Shore. Fibrowatt Ltd. first proposed a plant that would produce electricity from poultry manure nearly 10 years ago, after runoff from grain fields fertilized with chicken manure was blamed for toxic outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida. The microorganism caused fish kills and forced three Maryland rivers to be closed to recreational use. Fibrowatt, which was operating two poultry manure-burning plants in England in 1997 and had a third under construction, offered to build a plant here that would burn about 400,000 tons of chicken manure a year and produce more than enough electricity to supply a city the size of Salisbury.

The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development has selected two companies and plans to select a third that it will help finance with projects to dispose of excess chicken manure on the Eastern Shore.The programs are financed by the Animal Waste Technology Fund, which was established by the General Assembly last year to provide grants or loans to entrepreneurs who are developing alternatives to land application of manure. The fund is administered by DBED and is slated to receive $3 million over three years.

Perdue Farms Inc., the giant Salisbury-based chicken processor, has teamed with a small Missouri-based company to build the first Eastern Shore factory that will convert chicken manure into pelletized fertilizer.The $6 million project, which could receive funding from the state, is designed to help rid the Delmarva Peninsula of excess poultry litter in an environmentally friendly manner.In announcing the initiative, James A. Perdue, chairman of the nation's third-largest poultry processor, said that "both poultry and crop producers are faced with increasing environmental mandates on farming; our goal is to help keep farming viable on the Delmarva Peninsula."

WASHINGTON -- Critics of the tax-cut bill took mostly broad swipes at the measure yesterday, but one particular provision really ruffled their feathers: a tax credit for chicken manure."

Hoping to curb water pollution from chicken manure and other animal waste, the Environmental Protection Agency will for the first time attempt to hold processing companies as accountable for runoff as the farmers who grow the chickens, hogs and cattle.But with enforcement of the new rules to be left up to the states, farmers could still end up bearing most of the burden of additional costs, red tape and penalties."Whichever way they go, the companies will have control through the contracts [with farmers]

WASHINGTON -- Concluding weeks of contentious negotiations, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved yesterday a $390 billion spending package that completes budget work for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.The vote was 296-135, with a bipartisan majority supporting the far-reaching measure, which includes new money for teachers, police, environmental programs, hurricane relief, parklands and the Middle East peace process."

Maryland and Delaware are considering a joint project to reduce chicken manure waste in both states by burning it in a power plant in Vienna, Md.Govs. Parris N. Glendening and Thomas R. Carper announced that their states may join in converting the coal-powered plant after they met yesterday with officials of Conectiv Inc., which owns the facility.Conectiv is the holding company for Delmarva Power & Light Co., one of the utilities supplying electricity to the Eastern Shore.The two Democrats disclosed few details of the proposal other than to say that it was one of several being considered to rid Delmarva of its huge concentration of poultry litter.

THE $6 MILLION in fines and remedies that Tyson Foods Inc. will pay for polluting Chincoteague Bay is the stiffest penalty levied for water pollution in Maryland.The settlement that calls for reducing manure and bacterial runoff pollution should send a clear signal to the rest of Maryland's $1 billion poultry industry that remedial action is needed, not only by chicken processing plants but by farmer-growers who raise the birds."This action shows that it's more expensive not to comply with the law than to comply with it," a Justice Department lawyer said of the Tyson fine.

A British company's hopes for building a poultry manure-fueled electric power plant on the Delmarva peninsula received a big boost yesterday when Sen. William V. Roth Jr., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, introduced legislation that would give a tax break for such a project."

Maryland is taking a hard look at a British company's technology that uses chicken manure to fuel electric power plants in England, but it is not ready to commit to a similar project here, state officials said yesterday.James W. Peck, director of the Maryland Environmental Service, said there was "a great deal of interest" in the concept after two presentations this week by Fibrowatt Ltd. to more than a half a dozen state and federal agencies.During the meetings, held by the Maryland Environmental Service, Rupert Fraser, the London company's director of finance, told how the company has already built two chicken manure-burning electric power plants in England.

The Environmental Protection Agency has told Maryland's poultry farmers it intends to enforce for the first time federal pollution rules governing chicken manure - a crackdown that has surprised and angered growers while pleasing environmentalists who've long complained about agricultural runoff fouling Chesapeake Bay. At meetings recently on the Eastern Shore, EPA officials told several hundred farmers that they must get federal pollution-discharge permits...

If Maryland moves forward with a chicken manure-burning electric power plant, a British company could revive its plans to build the facility on the Eastern Shore. Fibrowatt Ltd. first proposed a plant that would produce electricity from poultry manure nearly 10 years ago, after runoff from grain fields fertilized with chicken manure was blamed for toxic outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida. The microorganism caused fish kills and forced three Maryland rivers to be closed to recreational use. Fibrowatt, which was operating two poultry manure-burning plants in England in 1997 and had a third under construction, offered to build a plant here that would burn about 400,000 tons of chicken manure a year and produce more than enough electricity to supply a city the size of Salisbury.

It's not often that we hear studies in the poultry industry described as revolutionary, as a Maryland university professor put it the other day. Average consumers care little more about chickens than that the ones they buy at the market or roadside barbeque be fresh and cheap. We have so many other pressing daily cares that, well, what happens in chicken houses stays in chicken houses. That's technically not true - just ask any environmentalist or chicken-farm neighbor - and that's why the University of Maryland Eastern Shore's $3.3 million project to redesign the physical structures where broilers are raised may very well produce revolutionary results.

A century after horses relinquished to automobiles their lead role in American transportation, horsepower may be making a comeback. With help from the federal and state governments, Anne Arundel County recently commissioned an $85,000 study to determine whether horse manure can efficiently be used to produce electricity and liquid fuel for motor vehicles. The notion of converting animal waste into an alternate energy source is not new, but such efforts have proved impractical when the conversion process was too expensive or the waste - such as chicken manure - was more commercially valuable as a fertilizer.

ON THE POCOMOKE RIVER -- Joseph Fehrer Jr. paddled through dirt-black water and past islands of gnarled roots to an ancient cypress tree. On one side of the colossus stretched 1,000 acres of farmland where a developer plans to build 2,170 homes, a grocery store, a movie theater and shops that would triple the population of Snow Hill. On the other side of the tree, across the Pocomoke River, sits a 9,300-acre nature preserve that Fehrer's father helped create to protect this rare and vanishing cypress swamp.

IT DOESN'T come close to reaching the level of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, but farmers in Maryland, as well as those in other parts of the country, have been fighting with their neighbors across the fence over manure -- specifically its smell -- for as long as anyone can remember. "It happens every year," Maryland Agriculture Secretary Lewis R. Riley said during a cell-phone interview one day last week as he was spreading chicken manure over grain fields at his farm near Parsonsburg in Wicomico County.

An injustice to Maryland's poultry industry The Sun's editorial "Playing chicken with the bay" (June 18) did a great injustice to Maryland's chicken industry, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Sun readers. The editorial erroneously states that 1 billion chickens are raised each year on Maryland's Eastern Shore. In fact, last year only 284 million broiler chickens were produced, a number comparable with recent years. The editorial states that Governor Ehrlich "officially ditched the chief measure in place" to control chicken litter.

SALISBURY - Declaring that the Maryland poultry industry's "time in the desert is over," Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. introduced a task force yesterday that he said will help ensure economic stability for the Eastern Shore's chicken business. Ehrlich, who campaigned last year promising to "give farmers a seat at the table" when decisions are made, vowed yesterday to cooperate with what he called mainstream environmental groups. He acknowledged, however, that organizations such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation were not included on the new task force and were not consulted about its makeup.

Poultry producers should be responsible for managing waste I applaud Maryland officials for developing regulations that hold poultry producers responsible for pollution caused by chicken manure ("New rules for poultry firms set," July 17). William Satterfield, executive director of Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., labels the state's action "a threat to Maryland's small family farms." But in reality, these contract chicken farms are anything but "small." A typical 40-foot by 400-foot broiler house holds 20,000 chickens.

Maryland's largest poultry company owners reacted with outrage yesterday after state officials completed new regulations that will hold the businesses responsible for water pollution caused by chicken manure. The regulations, believed to be the first of their kind in the country, will require poultry companies to verify that their growers have plans for getting rid of manure without causing polluted runoff. Such pollutants have been blamed for fish kills and are suspected of triggering toxic outbreaks of Pfiesteria in 1997.